This invention relates in general to firearms, and more particularly to magazine chargers.
Rifles with detachable magazines are widely used in military, law enforcement, recreational, and hunting activities. Some of these activities involve the use of many rounds of ammunition and therefore require frequent, repeated loading of magazines. While it is possible and common for magazines to be manually loaded, it may be a time consuming and physically demanding activity.
In some cases, ammunition may be purchased already attached to a carrier commonly known as a stripper clip. When used in conjunction with a loading fixture, the stripper clip allows the ammunition to be rapidly loaded into a magazine. However, stripper clips are typically limited to ten rounds of ammunition, while magazines commonly require thirty rounds or more. Also, ammunition is often purchased loosely boxed and disoriented rather than attached to stripper clips, and in these cases the rounds of ammunition must be handled individually.
There have been various inventions proposed that address different challenges associated with loading ammunition into detachable magazines. Some are designed to reduce the physical burden of forcing the ammunition into the magazine, and some are designed to reduce the time required to load ammunition into the magazine. However, each proposed solution is limited in some way. In some cases, the physical burden may be reduced but the process remains time consuming. In other cases, the ammunition may be rapidly loaded but only after each round is correctly oriented and aligned into a fixture. In previously proposed solutions for loading loose ammunition into magazines, each individual round must be handled either to be loaded into the magazine or to be staged in a fixture for subsequent loading.
There remains a need for a magazine loading device capable of loading loose, disoriented ammunition to a magazine, that does not require each individual round to be handled and that orients each round of ammunition correctly before insertion into the magazine.